


goodbyes

by rae_tnub



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Angst, Goodbyes, M/M, Multiverse, Parallel Universes, Pre-Relationship, Self-Sacrifice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:00:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23055901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rae_tnub/pseuds/rae_tnub
Summary: “I always thought we’d have more time,” Tino whispers. “That’s why I never said anything. We were supposed to have more time.”Adam’s fingers tighten in his. “I know,” he says eventually, then sighs. “This proves the infinite multiverse theory, though, right? That means that there’s a million versions of us out there that make it.”“It should’ve been this version.”Adam sighs, leaning forward to press their foreheads together. “Yeah, Tino, it should’ve.”
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 7
Kudos: 11





	goodbyes

They’d been given three days. Three days to hand over Adam Lukas or face all-out war. A war they were so hilariously under-prepared for. Even with the backing of the United States military, it wouldn't be enough.

The three days are up tomorrow, Tino knows, and that’s why he’s standing here, in front of the dorm he knows Adam prefers when he stays at the agency.

His hands shake. It feels like his whole world is shaking as he stares at the familiar door in front of him.

He’s not dumb—Adam’s going to give himself up. Even if no one else has realized it yet. Why would they? Adam had been an unwilling participant in this whole thing from the very beginning. He had only gotten involved in the beginning because of his family, because family is the only reason Adam Lukas ever did anything. Even when the director had approached him in hopes of recruiting him after that first mission, Adam had refused.

Tino doesn’t really know how Adam kept getting involved, but he knows that the agency shells out millions of dollars every time the team needed him on a mission. The expenses had been argued to death by the higher ups, over and over and over again, but the truth is that Adam Lukas was the most valuable asset the agency had. No one on the team had ever pretended otherwise and as a result, the higher ups were always willing to pay Adam’s consultation fees.

He raps on the door once.

It doesn’t take long for the door to open.

Adam meets Tino's eyes in the open doorway with a carefully blank look on his face, leaning one shoulder against the door frame with crossed arms. He stares at Tino for a long moment.

"Can I come in?" Tino asks.

The brunet sighs, straightening up. He turns on his heel and walks into the room without closing the door.

Tino takes that as an affirmative, stepping into the room and quietly shutting the door behind him. He leans back against it, glancing around the room. It looks the same as any other dorm at the agency's headquarters. Adam never spent much time here, instead always heading back to his townhouse on the Upper East Side. He's an independent contractor, after all, not a permanent employee. Even with that, the room is still sad. The same bought-in-bulk furniture as the rest of the rooms, plain beige walls, no decorations.

The only evidence that anyone's been staying here is the unmade bed. It's like Adam never existed in this space.

Adam pulls out his desk chair and sits backwards on it, folding his arms over the back of the chair as he stares back at Tino.

The room is uncomfortably silent for a long moment. Tino digs his hands into his pockets, eyes focusing on the window behind Adam's desk. Headquarters is only a little less than an hour outside of the city, but it seems like a different world. It's just far enough into autumn that the leaves are starting to change colors. The trees in the distance are a beautiful landscape of reds, yellows, oranges, and greens, but none of them have fallen yet.

“You’re going to do it, aren’t you?”

Tino doesn’t realize he's spoken until Adam meets his eyes with that same cold, detached poker face he always has.

“What choice do I have?”

Tino bites his lip, staring at the man sitting across from him. It’s hard, realizing that after tomorrow he’s never going to see him again. After tomorrow, Adam Lukas will be nothing more than a memory. A memory of a man who gave himself up to save the world. He hopes the world will honor Adam the way he deserves.

“Kev said it himself. Even just one life is too much,” Tino says, but he knows it’s useless. Adam has already made up his mind.

“My life isn’t worth the millions we’ll lose if we bring a war we can’t win to New York City,” Adam replies plainly.

Tino winces at his words, but as much as he loves Adam, he can't argue against that. It's really just the trolley question on a much bigger scale. Utalitarianism or deontological ethics. One life or eight million. There isn't a world where this is even a question.

Tino _knows_ this is the right thing to do, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t _hurt_. He had known for a long, long time that he was in love with Adam. And he’d known that Adam was in love with him for almost as long. There wasn’t a lot that Tino would say he was absolutely sure of, but those were some of them. He was as sure that they’d eventually be together as he was sure that water was wet, that the sky was blue, that the grass was green. It was supposed to be an indisputable fact.

“I know,” he says eventually, staring down at his hands. There's a million more things that need to be said, but Tino can't figure out how to say them.

Kev and Marley have been debating their strategy down in the war room for days now. Neither of them will even consider sacrificing Adam, but Tino's accepted it. They might not sacrifice him, but Adam's going to sacrifice himself.

Tino's world is going to change tomorrow. Once Adam leaves, once the doppelgangers take him through their portal, everything is going to change. The media is going to ask who Adam Lukas was in his life. Tino's already dreading that question, because the truth is Adam hadn't even known who he was in life. How could the world expect Tino to know anything of the man who never knew who he was?

There’s a Chuck Palahniuk quote that Adam had mentioned back when they first met. _“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.”_ Maybe in a different context that quote would be inspirational or flattering, but in the context of Adam Lukas, it’s just pitiful.

None of his power is truly _his_. None of his skills are truly _his_. He copied his art skill from his mother, his invisibility from an unknown person years ago when he didn’t have as fine of a control as he does now, his math genius from the head of the mathematics department at Columbia University, his fire from an opponent on the battlefield. There was no way of knowing what parts of Adam Lukas were truly _his_ , and isn’t that just a shame?

Adam described his power as being similar to a USB drive once. Everything that makes up a person—their memories, their friendships, their skills, their knowledge, their power—is its own file. Adam’s power let him copy any of those files, and as far as Tino knew, could hold and use them infinitely, keep as many powers as he wants, and permanently take them away if he needed to.

It was a power that could bring the entire world to its knees. And yet, Adam had chosen not to get involved. He had chosen apathy, and had kept choosing apathy until his mother had been murdered by a villain. Every other time the agency wanted him to get involved, he demanded a payment. Because he had four younger brothers to put through college, and he can’t pay for them directly. Not after his father had found out what he’d done to get the millions of dollars he now sits on.

"Have you seen your brothers?" Tino asks instead of thinking about tomorrow.

Adam shakes his head. "I can't get close enough without Dad or someone showing up," he answers, then sighs, leaning his head down on his arms. "What do you think Dad's going to do when I'm declared missing?"

Tino blinks. "Are you planning to leave without people knowing who you are?" he asks.

"They asked for Revolt, not Adam Lukas."

No. Adam doesn't deserve to leave this planet anonymous. He deserves to be remembered for every piece of him, the good and the bad. He deserves to be remembered as the twenty-four-year-old son of the NYPD commissioner. He deserves to be remembered as the accountant and owner of an art gallery and auction house. Maybe he even deserves to be remembered as the urban legend he was. He doesn't deserve to be remembered as nothing but a mask.

"Is that really what you want, Adam?"

Adam looks up at Tino with a frown, running a hand through his hair. "I don't know."

"Oh."

"But I trust you to make that choice for me," Adam says.

Tino startles a bit, staring at him in disbelief. "What?"

Adam shrugs, leaning back in his seat and reaching behind him for a manila folder. "You have power of attorney over all of my affairs. You inherit almost everything I've ever had, except for a fund for my brothers' college," he says, holding the folder up for a moment before putting it back on the desk behind him.

"Adam..."

"I made this decision years ago, Tino. The will's two years old." Adam pauses, leaning his cheek onto his palm. "How do you want me to be remembered?"

"As a person, not some infalliable mask," Tino says honestly, staring across the room at Adam. "If no one ever knows who you were, that's all you'll ever be. Some larger-than-life figure that people can misconstrue and bend and mold to mean something else. You won't be remembered as _you_. You're so much more than that fucking mask."

Adam offers him a sad smile. "Then let me be remembered that way."

“You’ve never copied my power,” Tino says quietly, after a long moment. “You’ve copied Marley’s and Davey’s and Kev’s, but you’ve never copied mine.”

Adam stares back at Tino. “No, I haven’t. You were—there was always something special about you, Tino. I didn’t want to take more from you than I already had.”

“What if I gave it to you?”

He feels Adam’s eyes lock onto him and tries not to cave under them. Adam had always been intense, on the field and off. Almost too intense for Tino to handle.

“What.”

Not a question. A statement.

“I want you to have a piece of me, when you’re gone. When you’re over there, I want—proof, I guess, that you won’t forget me. This isn’t you taking it from me, it’s me giving it to you,” Tino says, pushing off the door and moving to stand in front of Adam’s chair. He slowly settles his hand in Adam’s hair, tangling his fingers in the brown curls, and lets a short breeze flow through it.

It had been an inside joke—he always did this to mess with Adam, to hear the all bark, no-bite threats to his life, to see the mild annoyance grace his features, to watch him run his own fingers through his hair in a useless attempt to fix it.

When the media and politicians had found out about the true nature of Adam’s power, it seemed like all they did was demand for his identity to be revealed to the public. A million and one think pieces were written, on what it means when someone can take whatever they want from you, when you can’t consent to something being taken from you, when one person has that much _power_. These days, the think pieces are dwindling, but most far-right politicians and publications still call for Adam’s identity to be revealed.

Won’t they be surprised tomorrow? Tino won't let him leave this Earth anonymous.

Tino feels his cheeks burn as Adam looks at him, expression unreadable.

Adam is silent for a long time, but eventually he reaches up and holds onto Tino’s wrist. His grip lingers for far too long, since Tino knows that Adam only needs the slightest brush of skin, especially if he knows what he’s trying to copy. He stands eventually, pulling Tino's hand out of his hair to tangle their fingers together at their sides, moving his free hand to catch his fingers in the strands of Tino’s hair. 

Tino smiles sadly when he feels wind blow through his hair.

There’s no annoyance or threats or attempts to fix it this time, just silent acknowledgement. A silent realization that this is goodbye.

Adam meets his eyes and Tino, despite being able to control the wind, feels it knocked out of him. The emotion on Adam’s face is one he’s seen before, but it’s never been displayed this openly. It’s love, he realizes, and it’s the same look Tino has when he looks at Adam. It’s an all-encompassing, pure, limitless love, the kind that will last across parallel universes, across galaxies, across time if it comes to that.

“I always thought we’d have more time,” Tino whispers. “That’s why I never said anything. We were supposed to have more time.”

Adam’s fingers tighten in his. “I know,” he says eventually, then sighs. “This proves the infinite multiverse theory, though, right? That means that there’s a million versions of us out there that make it.”

“It should’ve been this version.”

Adam sighs, leaning forward to press their foreheads together. “Yeah, Tino, it should’ve.”

Tino closes his eyes, letting himself lean into Adam’s touch. What does he feel? Is it heartbreak? Knowing that there’s always going to be a space, a gap, a hole in his life that’s shaped exactly like Adam Lukas? Is it pride? Knowing that Adam had finally decided to _care_?

Whatever that feeling is, it’s choking him. There’s a lump in his throat that wasn’t there three days ago. It’s been getting bigger the closer they get to their deadline.

“I love you,” Tino whispers into the silence, choking on a sob. “I’m sorry I never told you before.”

Adam’s hands both come up to rest on Tino’s tear-soaked cheeks as he gently makes him look up. “Look at me,” he says.

Tino isn’t sure what makes him open his eyes. It could’ve been the fact that it was _Adam_ asking him to do so. It could’ve been the way his voice was thick with emotion. It could’ve been anything, but he chokes on that lump again when he meets Adam’s eyes.

“I love you, too.”

It somehow feels like both a millennia and a millisecond before Adam’s lips meet his for a first kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> this is just some writing practice with my ocs that i was pretty proud of. you can find all my links at [ my carrd](http://raetnub.carrd.co).


End file.
